Presentations such as slide presentations may be generated by a computer system using a variety of user interfaces. A slide presentation may be generated by allowing the user to author individual slides, to be played back under control of a user interface that allows the user to move from one slide to the next.
Conventional user interfaces for preparing slide presentations can be cumbersome to use. For example, the Microsoft Powerpoint product employs a set of thumbnail images of each slide that the user scrolls through to find a slide. If there are many slides in the file, the user can spend a large amount of time scrolling through the slides. Apple's Keynote product allows the user to group slides, and then show thumbnail images of the first slide in each group, hiding the others, but this approach requires the user to manually move each slide after it has been created, a cumbersome task for slide presentations with large numbers of slides.
Conventional user interfaces do not allow the user much flexibility with information that is to be repeated from one slide to the next. Some conventional programs allow the user to define one or more “master” slides and assign each slide in the presentation to any one of the master slides. The information on the master slide is then displayed as a part of all of the slides that use that master slide, but they do not employ multiple levels of mastering. For example, if the author of the slide presentation has ten groups of ten slides each, and the user wants to put a corporate logo on every slide, and use a title of the group on every slide, the user must create ten master slides with the logo on each slide and the title of a different group on every master. If the corporate logo changes, the logo must be updated on each of the ten master slides.
Assignment of each slide to its master slide is also cumbersome. If a user wishes to change the assignment of five slides from one master to another, the user is required to locate each of the slides and then individually assign each slide to the new master through a cumbersome user interface. Furthermore, there is no way to quickly visually scan a group of slides to identify the master slide assigned to each one.
Conventional slide presentation authoring software does not allow the user great latitude to customize the playback user interface to suit the user's needs. The user is required to use the playback user interface designed by the authoring software.
Conventional slide presentations generate large files that can be time consuming to share over network connections such as the Internet.
What is needed is a system and method for generating slide presentations that can show and hide groups of thumbnail images corresponding to the slides without manual assignment of every slide after it has been created, provides flexibility for assignment of information that is repeated across multiple slides, allows rapid assignment and rearrangement of slides to master slides, can allow the user to quickly view the master slide or slides assigned to a slide, can allow the user to customize the playback user interface of the slide presentation, and can generate compact files to represent the presentations.